Sion Sono
Keiko Desu Kedo

There are heavy films, and then there's Keiko Desu Kedo by Sion Sono, which is like a bag of reinforced concrete thrown at you from three meters high in an attempt to kill you. Talking about it is both very easy and quite difficult: to start, it's the first review I'm leaving without a rating because conventional evaluation criteria are out of place.

The protagonist of this experimental work by Sion Sono is not the young and apathetic Keiko but a damned and obsessive clock face that seems to haunt us like a madman with a razor in hand. It forces us to move forward as Keiko does in the long, endless tracking shots of the final part, but where to? And why? The film is the most cerebral one can conceive, with extremely long static close-ups on the protagonist's face that reveal an endless monotony of days passing without anything particular happening. Life slips away from her hands in a brief and endless existence simultaneously, just like the film: it lasts only an hour, yet it can feel like an eternity. I found myself facing the very essence of anti-narrative: splendid photography and deep minimalism blended together. There is the viewer, there is Keiko, her father's bones dead from cancer, and the house where she lives, resembling a prison: the enlarged version of the water jug where her three goldfish reside.

A ineffable work on the passing of time, as if it were a kind of memento mori. At times it feels like observing Magdalene by G. De La Tour, content with the dim light of a candle burning away, expecting nothing more from life. Even the only funny moments made up of weekly news skits on the relevant events of Keiko’s day (where she appears with strange wigs as an announcer) have a tragic flavor: they are stories of few and small seemingly insignificant events, yet the only dull signs of life we receive from the outside world like reflections on shards of glass. She ends the newscasts by playing a voicemail always devoid of messages where only her own voice is heard before the beep. And in the end, the silence... a sad muteness where she finds nothing more to say. Nothing but ourselves at the mercy of a clock face, passively waiting for the next round to begin. She waits for her birthday, it arrives, there is no party, nothing happens... there's just the awareness of being one year older. And there she is bidding farewell, chanting for one last time her lullaby in which she counts to sixty in Japanese, thus marking in the viewer's mind the seconds one after another before slowly fading into a street at dusk.

It seems I have broken the rule of telling the plot, but in truth, I haven't because the film has no plot. I don't recommend it to most of you as it might appear incredibly boring: it's not only suitable for a few but also quite difficult to find. It can be given one star or five; both ratings would be meaningless. There are things that go beyond judgments and evaluations, and what this film can evoke is very subjective. It can lead to intimate reflections or communicate nothing; it can leave in the viewer's soul a strange emptiness or remain etched in thoughts like a particularly memorable painting.